by Robert Bloch
A. He had donated five million dollars to construct and equip a new cardiology wing.
Q. And so you were concerned.
A. I resent the implication. Every patient gets the same care at any hospital I operate. Now may I continue?
Q. Proceed.
A. Shortly after dinner that evening I was informed by Dr. Geiger in a call to my home that Agnes Perry’s parents had refused to grant consent for a transplant. I was also informed that Mr. Todd, though there were no potential donors, was flying out to the Coast immediately. I left my home at once and returned to the hospital. I wanted to see that everything was in readiness to ease Mr. Todd’s stay at Los Angeles General. I also wished to make sure that the hospital had informed other institutions of our situation.
Q. In what way?
A. Transplant surgery, as I am sure you are aware, is still a rather primitive science. There is no such thing as a heart bank. And so with each individual case, other hospitals are informed of our requirements. That is, to watch out for terminal cases whose blood type and rejection cycle are such that, should consent be given, they would qualify as donors. It is a question of finding the proper match.
Q. I see.
A. When I arrived at the hospital I went immediately to the cardiology wing to check on what progress had been made in obtaining a donor for transplant. I found Dr. Everett in his office.
Q. Dr. Everett?
A. Dr. Charles Everett. He’s second in command of the transplant team. Directly under Dr. Geiger. He had just been observing the progress of canine surgery—from a window in his office he could look down on the operating chamber below, where a heart-lung machine had been attached to a police dog. I must admit I was annoyed. With Mr. Todd’s plane arriving in four hours, I felt this was no time to be concerned about an animal. I’m afraid I expressed my opinion rather strongly. I pointed out to Dr. Everett that Mr. Todd was not just another patient. That he had put five million dollars into the hospital, thus far. Dr. Everett said, “Well, he’s going to make us earn that five million now. He wants a perfect match.”
I took exception to that remark—I felt that it was entirely uncalled for under the circumstances. And I was about to point this out to him in no uncertain terms when we were interrupted by a call. A possible heart donor had arrived in the Homograft Department. I—
Q. Would you give us that last again, please?
A. Homograft. H-o-m-o-g-r-a-f-t. You have it now? Very good. In this department, cadavers are dissected under conditions of utmost sterility so that their organs can either be stored or released for immediate use. The blood groups and tissue types of potential recipients are recorded by computers which match them with incoming organs. We have a Telex system to link our department with a network of other hospitals—we pool our availabilities with them, and they notify us regarding our own requirements. I am happy to say that this system has proved eminently effective.
Well. I accompanied Dr. Everett to Homograft. We found Dr. Piper—Leonard Piper, our head pathologist—in the midst of performing a PM.
Q. A post-mortem.
A. Post-mortem examination, that is correct. A pacemaker had been attached to the body of the deceased on the table. Dr. Piper was dictating his findings into a tape recorder as he worked. A very efficient man.
Extract From the Statement of Leonard Piper, M.D.
My name is Leonard Piper and I am the resident head of Pathology at Los Angeles General Hospital. At approximately nine P.M. the 12th of October last, I notified Dr. Everett to come to the Homograft Department where I was conducting a post-mortem examination of an indigent. This was a cerebral hemorrhage case—aneurism, severe brain trauma. A well-developed male, Caucasian, measuring five-feet ten-inches, weight approximately one hundred and seventy pounds, age around forty. We never did pinpoint it more closely because there was no positive identification. As I recall, the police picked him up downtown, on Fifth Street. He’d been in and out of the drunk tank, no next of kin, that much they did know. Enough to release the body to us. You understand that we—that is to say, the resident staff members—had been alerted on the immediate need of a donor for a heart transplant.
That’s where Dr. Everett came in. Everett and De Toledano. I’d never seen De Toledano in the department before—he’s inclined to be a little squeamish about our work, and I can’t really say that I blame him—but I guess in an emergency situation like this he wanted to be in on the findings.
Anyway they did come in, both of them, and just about that time I got the lab report on the blood sample I’d taken before starting the examination. It was AB-positive.
Everett told me he needed AB-negative. He thanked me and left. De Toledano went with him. He didn’t say anything, but he looked worried. Really worried. As the kids say, he was up-tight.
Continued Extract From the Statement of George Mantle, M.D.
I don’t remember anything unusual happening on the plane, no. Mr. McCullen was his usual overbearing self, perhaps a trifle more so. Mrs. Veillier actually looked better than she had for a long time. She hadn’t slept a full night in weeks, she wouldn’t accept any Nembutal, but she was dozing on the plane. McCullen, of course, was wide awake, dictating memos full speed ahead to various Todd Enterprises offices—always the same message, something to the effect that under no circumstances should anyone make a press statement regarding Mr. Todd, his physical condition, or his whereabouts. All questions to be answered with, “No comment.’’ It isn’t difficult for me to remember this, because I must have heard it repeated twenty times over. I don’t know why he didn’t just dictate one memo with instructions to send a duplicate to every office. It would have saved a lot of time, but then maybe he was deliberately trying to kill time. It occurred to me, frankly, that perhaps the dictation was just an excuse he employed to avoid conversation with me. As you must have gathered, Mr. McCullen and I were never on the best of terms. I resented his general officious attitude and he—but that’s not important here.
At any rate, Mrs. Veillier was asleep and McCullen was still dictating when I went back to see if Mr. Todd was sleeping. I regret to say that I found him wide awake, despite the sedative I had administered when we came aboard. As a matter of fact, he was throwing a coin into the air and catching it. It was an old Greek coin of some fantastic value that he always carried with him. The point of it for him wasn’t its value, not at all. The point was that he had brought it up out of a wreck himself, diving in the Aegean. It was a souvenir of the kind of man he had been. That was the point of the coin. “Sure I trust doctors,” he said when he saw me. I hadn’t said anything. “But I trust myself more.”
Extract From the Statement of Charles Everett, M.D.
My name is Charles Everett. I’m a vascular surgeon. I’ve been with the transplant team about a year and a half. I was at Temple University Hospital when Dr. Geiger, Walter Geiger, asked me if I wanted to join his staff. Well, hell, that’s like going from the Angels to the Yankees, I mean the Yankees in the old days. Over that period we performed fourteen transplants. Nine of those patients, I would like to say now, are still living.
Anyway, on the night in question I checked out a potential donor in our Homograft Department. The wrong blood type, so I stopped by our Telex office to make sure they’d sent out the emergency bulletin I’d given them. Mr. Todd had already turned down an O-donor we’d found earlier in the evening—he insisted on a perfect match—and so I put out the word to all hospitals within a hundred mile radius to notify us of possible terminal cases in the AB-negative blood group. They could be flown in to us within an hour.
De Toledano was with me. I guess he thought I’d been goofing off on this situation; I know he was surprised when he found out I’d put out the bulletin. He’d been pretty salty with me earlier in the evening but now he simmered down and said he was going to his office and to let him know if I needed him.
I went back to my office and called my wife—no answer, she wasn’t home—and then I left word
with the switchboard that I’d be in one of the staff bedrooms for the next hour. We use them to get in a little sacktime when we’re running late—the past few months I guess I slept there more than I did at the apartment. Anyway, I went in and stretched out but I didn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t, not after some of the things De Toledano had said. I shouldn’t have let him get to me that way, but you realize we were all under pressure. And all his talk about Todd’s donations to the hospital and how important it was that we find him a transplant didn’t help. He made it sound as if the real problem was how to save a checkbook, not a human life.
But it wasn’t just a question of motives that bugged me. Whatever our reasons—De Toledano’s, mine, those people flying out here on the plane—we were all doing the same thing now. Waiting. Waiting for some unknown person out there in Greater Los Angeles to die. That’s what really hit me. This was a deathwatch. I never think this way except in the middle of the night. The trouble is, out of the fourteen transplants I’ve been involved in, eleven have been performed between midnight and dawn.
Anyway, there I was lying in the dark when Dr. Geiger walked in. He’d seen De Toledano, of course, and heard about the run-in we’d had, and he must have realized how I felt. He’d told me before never to argue with hospital administration—they had their way of looking at the job and we had ours—but he didn’t say anything now. I don’t have to tell you he’s one of the world’s top surgeons, but sometimes I think he would have made a damned good psychologist too.
He switched on a lamp and sat down next to the bed and all he said was, “Forget it, Charlie. We’re doing everything we can at the moment.”
“It’s the waiting,” I told him. “It makes you feel like an undertaker. And if it’s bad for me, think of how it must be right now for Todd.”
Funny, I don’t have anything like total recall, but for some reason or other I can remember what Geiger said then, word for word. “You don’t have to worry about Hollis Todd,” he said. “What’s that line about the very rich? Well, Hollis is different. When I operate I have a certain confidence in myself. But I don’t carry that same confidence with me to the golf course or a duck blind or a poker table. Todd does. He’s convinced that he can’t lose—that he’s the best in anything he sets his mind to. I went hunting with him once in Canada, for caribou. The guide was one of those old-timers, knew those woods like the back of his hand. He said there wasn’t a caribou within a hundred miles. And Hollis fired him on the spot. Radioed his plane and had his pilot fly in and take the guide back. So there we were, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no guide. Hollis got a bull the next afternoon.”
Right then is when the phone rang. There was a call from Bakersfield and the operator switched me over. I talked to the resident there—sorry, I don’t recall his name at the moment, but that’s not important. The important thing is, he’d received our emergency bulletin and he was phoning in to tell us he had a compatible donor. AB-negative, no body damage. I began to check out the details on Rh factor, rejection ratio, and it was the match we were looking for, no doubt about it. Then I said something to him about Todd, and all of a sudden he began to stammer and apologize. It seems that when he got the bulletin he hadn’t noted Todd’s age. And the possible donor at Bakersfield was only nineteen months old.
Continued Extract From the Statement of Eva Veillier
. . . It seemed to me that we must have been somewhere over the mountains when suddenly the cabin lights went out. I felt the plane shuddering and then it began to tilt at a crazy angle. Everything happened so quickly there was no time to think, but I knew we were going to crash and I began to scream.
Somebody shook me by the shoulder and I saw it was Dr. Mantle standing there. “It’s all right,” he said, “you were having a nightmare.” As if I didn’t know for myself. Then he asked if I would like a Nembutal and I told him no, I had no intention of falling asleep again. What I really wanted to do was to see Hollis, but only if we could be alone. And I noticed Crosby wasn’t in the main cabin now—he must have gone back to talk with Hollis while I was sleeping—so I decided to wait until he returned.
Dr. Mantle went up forward, I think he wanted to see the steward and talk him into letting him have a drink while Crosby was gone. This worried me, the drinking, but at the moment I was glad to see him leave, anything was better than having him sit there and talk about the odds, will they find a donor, things like that. Ever since the flight started he kept going on this way, over and over again, like an old woman.
But I am being unfair, I realize that. Because you see I was thinking the same things, we all were. It was impossible to put such thoughts out of one’s mind at a time like this.
I started another game of solitaire but I was not able to concentrate properly and it went badly for me. I destroyed the game and laid out the cards again. Then I saw Crosby come out of the rear cabin and I stood up. He sat down in my place and began to play the cards and he said, “That’s how you tell winners from losers, Eva. Winners always finish the game.”
I did not speak to him. I went into Hollis’ cabin. He was awake, of course, but I told him to rest. I would not disturb him, I only wanted to sit beside him quietly. But he said no, he wanted to talk to me about some things that were private between us. And that is what we did.
Q. It would help us, Mrs. Veillier—
A. All right. He said that our time together had not been easy. Not yet, he said. But he had a feeling that everything would be all right. He said that he was a lucky man and he hadn’t felt the run stop yet.
Q. The run?
A. Of luck. I told him I did not like this talk of gambling, everyone speaking of odds and risks and chances. This was not a game, I said. “Oh, but it is,” Hollis said. “The greatest game of all. And for the highest stakes.” He could see I was not able to accept the situation on these terms, and he became more serious. He said he wanted more time, he needed it, we needed it. He said—he asked if I wanted to marry him.
Q. What did you say?
A. I said it made no difference to me. No difference. We were neither of us children, babies who needed words said over us. We had not been attracted to each other for the purest of motives, not in the beginning. Hollis had wanted me for reasons of his own. I had wanted Hollis because power attracted me. But all that was past. I told him we had already shared too many things, many of them bad, for us ever to be apart now.
Q. Was there anything more to the conversation?
A. We were interrupted. By the pilot, speaking over the intercom. He announced that we were coming into Los Angeles and an approach had been cleared for landing. We would be on the ground in approximately ten minutes—until then we should remain seated and fasten our belts. I did not return to my seat, I wanted to be with Hollis. When he felt the plane beginning to descend, he put his hand on mine. He knew that I do not like the landing.
Extract From Telephone Log, Communications Center, Los Angeles Police Department
DATE: 13 October TIME: 0437 NATURE OF CALL: Automobile accident, intersection Modeno Avenue and Roman Street, possible fatality CALLER: Mrs. Elsie Sandoz DISPOSITION: Dispatched ambulance, police cruiser No. 731 to scene of accident OPERATOR: CHL
Extract From Accident Report Filed by Patrolman Chester Forbis, Commanding Cruiser No. 731
From 0001 to 0800 13 October
At 0443, Patrolman Wanusek and I arrived at the scene of the reported accident. We made a preliminary surveillance of the area. A late model black Buick Riviera coupe was stopped in the intersection of Modeno Avenue and Roman Street, facing south on Modeno. It had been hit with great force on the right side by a heavy steel wheelchair. The driver of the vehicle and his passenger were uninjured. The operator of the wheelchair was lying in the street. He was unconscious. Investigation of the victim’s wallet identified him as Anton Polanski, male, Caucasian, twenty-four years of age. At 0447 an ambulance arrived at the scene. Though the vehicular traffic was light, I directed Patrolman Wanusek to
reroute it until the victim was placed in the ambulance. The ambulance departed the scene of the accident at 0452. Patrolman Wanusek and I began to interrogate witnesses to the accident. There were two; the driver of the Buick Riviera and his wife, Samuel and Elsie Sandoz. (Report attached.)
From a Statement Given to Patrolman Chester Forbis by Samuel Sandoz
13 October
“. . . My wife and I had dinner at General Lee’s in Chinatown and then afterwards we took a drive through the area around the Silver Lake Reservoir. We ended up in the hills above the lake. Neither of us had visited Los Angeles before and the view of the city at night was pretty impressive. But it was getting late and Elsie was tired, so we decided to go back to our motel. That’s the Shangri-Lodge, over on Hollywood Boulevard. We came down from the hills on some side street, I didn’t pay any attention to the name, and turned right on Modeno Avenue, heading south. We must have driven about half a mile and then, just as we were passing Roman Street, we got hit. I didn’t know what happened at first. There’s a row of trees on the right just before you get to the intersection and they cut off the view, and of course I didn’t see any car lights coming from the side street. I was doing between thirty and thirty-five when this happened. Just a hard thump, something hitting the right side of the hood. My wife screamed and I jammed on the brakes and stopped. Then I saw him lying there. We’d passed a filling station a block back, closed for the night of course, but I thought I remembered seeing a phone booth. So I sent Elsie to call the police and tried to do something for the man. He was out cold and looked pretty bad. I checked his pulse and it was still going all right, but I had enough sense not to try to move him. Looking around, I could see what must have happened. There’s a pretty steep hill on Roman Street and that’s where he came from. I guess somehow his wheelchair went out of control and he came ripping down, couldn’t stop. Just our luck to be passing by when he hit the intersection. Just his luck, you might say, but it came as one hell of a shock to us, let me tell you . . .”